Lynne Cohen
Empty Rooms, Silent Power
- PhotographerLynne Cohen
ALASTAIR PHILIP WIPER Cohen photographed classrooms, labs, and military facilities but never revealed what or where they were, leaving only the strange spaces themselves.
That lack of context makes them even more unsettling - you can’t help but imagine what might be happening there.
Lynne Cohen
Lynne Cohen (1944–2014) turned the empty interiors of classrooms, laboratories, and military facilities into unsettling portraits of modern life. Working with a large-format camera, she photographed institutional spaces with no people, only the traces of their routines - desks, diagrams, test equipment - arranged in perfect, eerie order.
Her precise compositions and neutral lighting make the familiar seem strange. A classroom inside a bomber, a laboratory of mysterious machines, a training room frozen mid-lesson: each reveals how environments shape behavior and embody systems of control. Cohen’s generic titles - Classroom, Laboratory, Training Facility - deny narrative, forcing us to read the architecture itself as evidence of unseen authority.
By removing people, Cohen exposes the human impulse behind these spaces - the need to organize, instruct, and monitor. Her photographs are both factual and psychological, transforming the ordinary into something quietly uncanny. In her hands, the empty room becomes a mirror, reflecting the order, anxiety, and beauty built into the structures that define us.
